Xiao-named people Genghis Khan's descendants

China Daily, 19-10-2012
 ZHENGZHOU - Evidence has indicated that people in central China's Henan province with the family name Xiao are the descendants of Genghis Khan, experts said at a seminar on Thursday.
The 5,000 people surnamed Xiao, finally found their ancestry to be of the Mongolian ethnic group instead of Han, after 20 years of research by five experts on Mongolian culture and history from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Nankai University and Inner Mongolian University.
The people living in 30-odd villages in Zhongmu county, all of them identified as Han ethnic group on their household registration books, are found to be descendants of Genghis Khan's grandson, who migrated to central China with his people, said Ren Chongyue, a researcher with the Institute of History of the Henan Academy of Social Sciences.
Ren said the experts had been looking for the descendants of the famous Mongolian emperor, and finally found clues in Zhongmu's county annuals. The tomes revealed that the Xiao family came from the Mongolian plateau and are related to a Mongolian noble. The news spread among the villages quickly and there is a great sense of satisfaction among the Xiao people, who have for a long time heard legends about their ancestry but have never had it confirmed, said Xiao Wenxue, director of the county's radio station.
"We have found a sense of belonging now that we know our ancestor. My clansmen plan to travel to Mongolia to worship the tomb of Genghis Khan, and try to establish a culture gallery to tell our own history," Xiao said.
A tombstone in the county also proved the Xiao people to be the offspring of Genghis Khan's eldest son, Shuchi, according to Du Rongkun, former director of the ethnology and anthropology institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Du told Xinhua that most of the inscriptions on the tombstone, kept in Zhongmu during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), have been worn away, but that a remaining one said residents surnamed "Xiao" are heir to the court of the Yuan Dynasty, which provided strong evidence of their history.
Hundreds of thousands of people are offspring of the Mongolians who migrated to central China and merged in with Han people after centuries, Ren said. "It is now hardly possible to tell Genghis Khan's descendants from other Han people in Henan," the researcher pointed out.